AWS Announces Amazon Managed (Apache) Cassandra Service

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced Amazon Managed (Apache) Cassandra Service, a scalable, highly available, and fully managed database service that supports Cassandra workloads. Developers can use the same Cassandra application code, Apache 2.0 licensed drivers, and tools as they do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon Managed Cassandra Service and enjoy scalability, availability, and manageability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. And, because Amazon Managed Cassandra Service is serverless, it also removes the need to provision, configure, and operate large Cassandra clusters, manually add or remove nodes, and rebalance partitions as traffic scales up or down. There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon Managed Cassandra Service, and customers only pay for the capacity they use. To learn more about Amazon Managed Cassandra Service, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/mcs.

Today, there are many customers using AWS who have asked for help with running, scaling, and managing their Cassandra database deployments. Managing large Cassandra clusters on-premises with hundreds of terabytes of data and millions of reads and writes per second is difficult and complex. Cassandra requires specialized expertise to set up, configure, and maintain the underlying infrastructure, and a deep understanding of the entire application stack, including the Apache Cassandra open source software. Aside from scaling clusters, customers must secure, patch, and operate Cassandra. Managing and scaling Cassandra clusters requires regularly adjusting complex configuration settings, manually adding or removing nodes, and rebalancing partitions, which can adversely affect availability and performance. Most customers with variable workloads also find it challenging to scale clusters up and down, so they often end up building clusters for peak loads and incur the unnecessary cost of paying for unused capacity. And, many customers also complain that they are unable to upgrade their cluster reliably due to Cassandra’s clunky rollback and debugging features, so they choose instead to run outdated versions of Cassandra.

Amazon Managed Cassandra Service provides a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service. Amazon Managed Cassandra Service is compatible with the open-source Apache Cassandra 3.11 API, enabling customers to migrate their workloads to Amazon Managed Cassandra Service and use the same Cassandra application code, Apache 2.0 licensed drivers, and tools that they use today. Amazon Managed Cassandra Service is serverless, so customers no longer need to provision, configure, and operate large Cassandra clusters, manually add or remove nodes, and rebalance partitions as traffic scales up or down. Amazon Managed Cassandra Service provides customers with single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, and can scale tables up and down automatically based on actual application traffic, with virtually unlimited throughput and storage. Amazon Managed Cassandra Service offers on-demand capacity, so customers pay only for the resources used by the application, and in early 2020, Amazon Managed Cassandra Service will also offer provisioned capacity, allowing customers to optimize costs by specifying capacity per workload. In early 2020, customers with existing Cassandra tables running on-premises or on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) will also be able to migrate tables to Amazon Managed Cassandra Service using AWS migration tools. Amazon Managed Cassandra Service integrates with other AWS services, so customers can help secure access to their tables using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), monitor their tables using Amazon CloudWatch, and manage their encryption keys with AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

“Customers who are running Cassandra have told us they want to spend less time scaling, patching, and managing infrastructure and more time building applications at scale,” said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Databases, AWS. “Amazon Managed Cassandra Service gives these customers the ability to run Cassandra without having to worry about managing the underlying hardware, and it gives them an easy way to integrate their Cassandra applications with other AWS services. Because Amazon Managed Cassandra Service is also serverless customers can stand up Cassandra clusters in minutes and scale their database up and down based on demand, so they can spend less time worrying about their clusters, and more time building the applications that impact their businesses.”

McDonald’s is one of the world’s leading food service brands with more than 36,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries. “Our developers like using Cassandra because of its scalability and open-source, CQL API. However, managing Cassandra infrastructure is complex and requires very specialized knowledge,” said Thilina Gunasinghe, Vice President of Global Technology, Architecture, and Data at McDonald’s. “We’re excited about the introduction of Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service because of its ability to scale Cassandra workloads up and down easily and its compatibility with the Cassandra drivers and development tools that our developers are already familiar with.”

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. “Adobe’s products and services empower our customers to design and create immersive, digital interactions with their brands,” said Dan Neff, Principal Architect, Adobe. “We’ve used Cassandra for years to help us store and manage data for many of Adobe’s applications. However, managing our Cassandra infrastructure is expensive and complex. With Amazon Managed Cassandra Service, we look forward to having a managed option to run our Cassandra workloads that offers us consistent performance at-scale and built-in enterprise management and security features, such as monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch, fully-managed durable storage, encryption, and access management using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).”

Reltio Cloud Customer 360 is used by Global 2000 companies to power their digital transformation by driving hyper-personalization, accelerating real-time operations, and simplifying compliance with customer consent and privacy laws. “Unlike traditional solutions, we use modern NoSQL technologies like Cassandra to give our customers business agility, enterprise scalability for real-time operations, and insight-ready data,” said Anastasia Zamyshlyaeva, Chief Architect and Co-founder, Reltio. “We have a close partnership with AWS and with the announcement of Amazon Managed Cassandra Service, we now have an efficient solution that can help us create workloads on a fully managed, serverless offering that future-proofs our customers’ investments.”

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